3PAR's New T-Class Storage Servers Make a Pop! in Storage

We hate to admit it but the deployment of enterprise storage often parallels all too closely to the familiar "Pop! Goes the weasel" nursery rhyme. Companies know how much capacity they need; they know which vendors are the cheapest; so that is where the money goes, until one day, Pop! Goes the storage!

If you followed that little rhyme you surely picked up on the fact that previously the only criteria that mattered for prioritizing how you spent your money was on storage capacity. The truth of the matter is that many organizations toil over how to efficiently pack-in data into the smallest storage unit. Then when things go Pop!, go south, or grind to a halt storage administrators, architects, programmers, DBAs, and IT management are called into action to scramble and find out why, all of a sudden, the user experience or the application run time has degraded.

Many times Jerome or I have been called to investigate and fix performance issues. More often than not, storage was purchased based solely on the reason of capacity. For instance, disk storage requirements for a new database were calculated at 100GB so 100GB of inexpensive disk storage was purchased--not understanding that database attributes such as transaction rates and throughput should also be considered in the purchase.

For this reason, IT's inability to properly purchase a storage solution that delivers both capacity and speed, we got excited by the prospects of this morning's announcement of the new T-Class storage servers from 3PAR. Uniquely combining utility storage with exceptional performance is a rare combination. The facts are storage administrator talent is becoming sparse, often inadequate, and is expensive to cultivate in-house. Deploying utility storage from 3PAR helps eliminate many of the costs associated with developing the talents of storage administrators in-house or using high-price consultant. Using 3PAR's new T-Class storage servers, continually tuning storage performance and allocating space should become a task of the past.

Proof in point, 3PAR's new T-Class storage servers recently set a new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 performance record for single-system storage arrays--doubling the performance of previous generation 3PAR S-Class arrays. These T-Class arrays, specifically the T800, generated nearly 225K IOPS in a published SPC-1 result. More significant, this array was maxed out to 83% capacity utilization (77,824 GB in a mirrored configuration) and was taken straight out of the box without using any complex configurations, performance tuning, or employing high-tech performance tricks, such as short stroking, to pump up performance.

Built on third-generation architecture, 3PAR is the first storage vendor to incorporate efficient silicon-based thin technologies into system hardware. The 3PAR T-Class arrays capitalize on a new, innovative Thin Built In architecture to introduce its new zero-detection functionality. Zero-detection finds unused capacity within "fat" data volumes with the ability to provide fat-to-thin volume conversions.

Fat-to-thin volume conversions are critical for those companies looking to migrate to 3PAR T-Class storage servers from existing storage systems. Zero-detection identifies over-provisioned volumes by looking for long strings of zeros in LUNs or volumes being migrated to the T-Class storage server as zeros are indicative of unallocated space on incoming LUNs.

By stripping out these zeros, companies can turn previously over-provisioned LUNs on older storage systems into thinly provisioned LUNs on the 3PAR T-Class storage system. This technique boosts capacity utilization by removing allocated but unused space from volumes. The T-Class storage servers implemented this within an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) instead of a software solution to ensure that it will not steal valuable CPU and memory resources not negatively impact application performance.

3PAR's new zero-detection feature addresses a long-standing criticism of storage systems about thinly provisioned volumes - how to easily migrate existing traditionally-provisioned, fat LUNs and convert them to thinly provisioned LUNs. 3PAR's implementation of zero-detection at the block level using its purpose-built ASIC now offers IT Management storage arrays that reduce the cost, complexity, and risk of deploying and managing a storage infrastructure. In so doing, companies that implement 3PAR T-Class family of storage systems should get the Pop! in storage capacity and performance without needing similar Pops! in administrative and capital costs to realize the inherent value that these storage systems provide.